the alternative right

Does an anti-capitalist right wing exist? Because it’s easily shown that capitalism is anti-traditional.

The contention that “egalitarian regimes” are the most murderous is not supported. Mr. Kurtagic seems to believe that 20th century communism appeared ahistorically and that it had no relationship to the previous century in which the industrializing imperial powers colonized much of the globe while locked in security and economic competition.

Private financial interests in western european societies shaped, influenced, and very often determined interpretations of national interest, usually by way of rationalization. “What’s in my financial interest is in the national interest” says the politically connected capitalist. So it’s easy to argue that the world to which 20th century communist revolutionaries were reacting was only the one that had previously been imposed by yesterday’s industrialists and the states that represented their interests internationally. The rise of egalitarian ideology in the 19th and 20th centuries was the consequence of the nationalist and racialist mysticism that justified imperialism from the 16th century on.

Americans familiar with their own history should recognize this, as the Boston Tea Party was itself a protest against the East India Tea Company having been granted a monopoly by the British crown. China was disintegrating for a full century as it was carved up by the imperialist powers. The context for its revolution was no different than the one that precipitated the American revolution.

Therefore, it’s questionable as to if there would have been a Mao, Stalin, or Pol Pot had it not been the case that militarily weaker countries were prey to the industrialized west. As for the “murderous” nature of them, it would be owed to the same problem, as the repression in the name of “equality” was actually an attempt, at least in the Soviet Union and China, to industrialize and achieve within a generation what their military rivals in the west had achieved over the course of a century. Industrialization is not about money or national pride, it’s about national security, as it is the basis for military viability and defense.

The legacy of European colonialism that was driven by industrialization (capitalism) was no less brutal, and its death toll was much higher. And there was certainly no concern for egalitarianism to be found anywhere within its myriad ideological justifications.

I’m perfectly willing to take the right wing and even the radical racialist right seriously if they would stop tearing down strawmen and battling imaginary leftists who believe imaginary things, and start grappling with the actual arguments their critics are making. Nothing of the sort is to be found in Kurtagic’s lecture, unfortunately.

It is also highly disingenuous to pretend that the Jacobins weren’t a product of the same intellectual currents that gave birth to the American Revolution. Jefferson, who was in France during the Revolution and found common cause with it, would have disagreed with Kurtagic’s characterization of it. There is so much wrong with this lecture that I can’t even address it all. I’ll just stop right here.